A popular TimeZest capability is to remind clients who have booked an appointment that is about to happen - to ensure they're ready, and that no-one's time is wasted because they've forgotten about it.

This tutorial shows how you can build these reminders using TimeZest's new workflow functionality.

Create a Appointment Reminder Email Template

First, we'll create a new email template which we can use to send an email reminding clients of their appointment. Go to Email Settings, then click +New Email Template.

Give the email template a name, select Reminder Template (although this field has no effect with the new workflow engine), and select Start with the default template. Click Next >.

For the Subject Line, use the following value:

For the Email Body, you will be able to customize the message of the reminder to include the appointment start time, duration, online meeting URL, and more. See Starting with the new Email Editor to get familiar with how to use the email editor.

Click Save Changes to save the new email template.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll create a new appointment type so you can actually build this functionality without affecting your existing operations. Once you've seen how it's done, you can make the modifications to any existing appointment types you have.

Log in to TimeZest as an administrator, click on Appointment Types, then New Appointment Type.

Give the new appointment type a name, ensure Create a new appointment type with default values is selected, and click Create Appointment Type.

By default, TimeZest creates new appointment types in Classic Configuration mode, which means that it manages the triggers and actions of the workflow, allowing you to use the familiar interface to configure TimeZest. For this appointment type, we want to change the appointment type into Workflow mode, so that we can directly edit the triggers and actions.

Click on the Workflow tab, then Switch to Workflow Mode, and then click Confirm in the confirmation dialog which appears.

You'll now be able to edit the workflow directly.

To add this functionality to the workflow, we're going to add a single trigger, and a single action to the workflow.

The trigger is the "At a specific amount of time before the start of the appointment" trigger, which TimeZest fires at the configured amount of time before the scheduled start time of the appointment that the client has chosen.

In the Add New Trigger section, select At a specific amount of time before the start of the appointment, and click "Add New Trigger". TimeZest will add this trigger to the workflow - with a default value of 2 hours before the appointment type, and no actions, so this trigger won't do anything yet.

First, we'll configure the trigger to run 10 minutes before the scheduled appointment time. Hover over the trigger name, and click on the pen which appears to edit the trigger.

Then change the value to 10 minutes, and click Save. You'll see that the trigger is updated.

Now we'll add an action to the trigger so that it actually does something. We'll add the Send Email using a Template action to send a reminder email using the template we created earlier.

Select Send to the Client to tell TimeZest to send an email to the client, select the name of the reminder template you created earlier for the Template, and select Send email without a calendar invite attached, since the client will already have the appointment in their calendar.

Click Save Changes.

That's it. TimeZest will now send an email to the client 10 minutes before the scheduled appointment time.